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Welcome all to the 130th round of the Dakka Painting challenge. For the unfamiliar, this is a friendly painting competition open to members of all skill levels and experience, whether your entry is your first or you thousand-and-first time painting miniatures. Each month, finished entries are collected into a thread where the community can vote on their favorite pieces, and those votes go towards an annual overall League that runs for 12 rounds.

This month is the Open Round. Subject to the normal rules, but paint whatever your heart desires. This is a busy month for a lot of people so paint what you have time for. Have a hobby related New Year’s resolution you need to do a few more models for? Now’s the time! Let’s finish 2025 off with some fun and amazing entries!

How To Enter

- You may enter up to 5 MODELS as a SINGLE ENTRY, and are permitted one entry per member per month. If you enter multiple models, they should ideally be related in some way, such as part of the same squad, unit or scene if you are doing a diorama
- You may enter at any time during the month, up to the last minute. We do encourage people to enter early, as to be part of the community, but if you can’t start until the 11th hour, that’s OK.
- You MUST post a 'proof' picture of your entry in the thread of the state it was in before you started working on it; this must be either unassembled, unpainted, primed or coated a single colour. Entries that do not submit a valid Proof Picture will not be eligible for voting.
- After this, you may post WIP pictures in this thread and your own if you wish, and on completing the entry, you may post up to 6 final pictures IN THIS THREAD that will then be used for voting. Please note that pictures in a montage or collage picture will be considered individual images for this purpose, so while these types of presentation are certainly acceptable, please keep the image limit in mind when compiling them. For example, a collage of 5 images and one separate image would count as your 6 picture allowance.


So What Do I Win?
- Points... and points mean... bragging rights for the next month! Following the vote, points will be awarded to every entrant. This year, the Points you receive will be equal to the Percentage of Votes your entry receives in the final Voting thread; if you get 10%, you get 10 points, if you get 6% you get 6 points, so on and so forth.

These points will be used to form a league table, which will be updated month on month as the results come in.

How Long Do I Have?
This challenge begins 1st of December and will end at midnight EST on December 31st. After this, I shall compile the finished entries into a new thread, and voting will run for 5 days.

This time around I didn't have the time or energy to prepare anything big and flashy to end the year with a bang like I usually do, so instead I'm going to paint a seasonal model.

When you think about it Frank is a lot like Santa. He is generous in giving, goes to great lengths to ensure everyone gets what they deserve, and you do so not want to end up on his naughty list. Who knows, maybe there's even a fake beard and funny hat in that bag of his.

This month, I will be painting my advent calendar :

I'll probably just pick my favourites, but I'm leaning already towards the Bretonnians in a festive Green Knight scheme.

Hopefully I can get all 5 done, but might fall short and just get one or two across the line.

I did a retrospective advent last year, was a fun hobby project. No way can I paint a mini a day for a month.

I'm looking forward to seeing that Blood Bowl team, Graven

I just happen to have five freshly primed models that I haven't started yet, but badly want to finish this year. This open round works out well for me. I'll try to finish my custom White Scars and Raven Guard captains (firstborn) two scratch built dreadnoughts and a 3D printed dreadnought.

I’ll paint these Valkyrie miniatures for Robotech RPG Tactic.

You better watch out:



Improvised with a body from the Kill Team starter box, a Necromunda v1 plastic Goliath ganger, and an upside-down Stormcast head that'll hopefully look like a mug of ale when it's painted, to look like the chap on the left:

Eeheehee! Love it!

I will figure something out. I now have some more old metal Necromunda to paint.

Cheers,

CB

Need to finish the dwarf army.

I just wasted time and money, anyone ran into similar issues before?
Metallic paint reacting/re-melting the primer?
I waited few hrs between the primer and metallic paint, should have I waited a day or two? Is that a wrong metallic paint to use over that type of primer? Is the plastic surface too shiny?



Stripped it.

I’ve never double sprayed before. I do a rattlecan to prime, then fuzzy sticks to smear the rest of the colors around. That does seem really odd.

I waited 3 hrs between primer and the metallic paint.
Used chatgpt, to find some answers and it seems that I should of waited 48 hrs for the primer to fully dry. The propellant in the metallic paint is too aggressive.

What do you like to use for metallic basecoat?

I generally wait 24 hours or more after spray priming for things to cure/outgass. Makes sense.

I prime everything white, and work from there. Best practice? Probably not. What I do? Yup!

 Nevelon wrote:
I generally wait 24 hours or more after spray priming for things to cure/outgass. Makes sense.
I prime everything white, and work from there. Best practice? Probably not. What I do? Yup!

Lesson learned, I will give it 24hr from now on.
I tend to always prime white, but these guys are all metal (like GK), wanted to save some time with the basecoat.

Primed white (bonding primer), but I gave a spray from the bottom to avoid painting in the shadows by hand, but left the top because silver will go on top anyways.
I am trying to cut as many corners as possible, and sometimes it even works.

Related PSA on that topic:
if you ever get a bad prime, strip and scrub it ASAP. There is a huge difference in the elbow grease needed to scrub it before it’s fully cured and after. So get it into your paint stripper of choice before you regret it.

One day of drying wasn’t enough. I even tried a different metallic paint, but it still wrinkled—smaller wrinkles, but still there. It seems like the primer may need a full week to cure.
Think folks skip the primer when base coating with metallics, so maybe I should’ve tried that first.

90% of the time, cutting corners does not work.
But I can work that 10% and upgrade from (New shiny golem) to (Same New shiny golem but with a "Battle Worn" skin dlc)
I am varnishing them as is and spraying with metallic over varnish.

I’m feeling good about my chances. Adding a couple of more minis to my entry. Here’s the proof pic.

Progress

My brother wants a bronze dragon for his DnD campaign. I have always wanted to try my hand at some of the stuff from Rescale Miniatures. I have already started the printing process, so I should be able complete this by the end of the year.

@Mothsniper: I'm glad to see you're still progressing with so many setbacks.

I just started to put the first bits of paint on mine this morning.

I will throw these guys in for my Christmas return to the fray!

I love the variety in these open rounds.

I'll be painting these guys from Midland Miniatures:



I got them from Midlam's Down and Out on Grubb Street KS.

Done - Garaz-Ngol Golems
(https://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/30/804229.page#11793803)

In a bizarre turn of affairs, I've had some free time in the past couple of weeks. I was also entering a competition on Instagram on some Blanche style cards and to create a mini based upon it.

I finished the build on Friday night and painted it up last night, thought it would do quite nicely for this comp as I've not managed to get anything done for ages.

Here's the progress photos:





I present: Suffer not the Alien...





Few things more enjoyable to me than having a good rake around in the bitz box to find the parts for a project.

I think it looks suitably grim and dark..

Cheers all.

Love those bursts of energy and purpose.

Since I won't have much free time this December, I'm only going to do a small entry.

A couple of Fireforge Games Samurai:

The first of my five is complete: My scratch-built, Iron Hands Dreadnought "Emendatio"

I'm back, and going to have to keep it kind of simple this month due to lack of free time (and serious lack of energy with this new job). I'll be entering some Tomb Kings Skeleton Horse Archers:

Army Painter Speedpaints should mostly make quick work of these, and I'll pick the best ones to be my entry since we only get to enter five models, as usual.

Having circled around hobbying for most of the year, I have a definitive project that is feasible to do in December

Terminators are needing some nice colours. Ignore the painted test guy (an extra to make up the 5th entry is en-route):